Marguerite Rhesilva, over the last few months, had a growing interest in the death of her son. He was not dead yet, and Marguerite did not want him dead, but the idea of having a dead son excited her. Looking at the other women in the neighborhood, Marguerite could see the same panic and worry in the growing dark flesh beneath their eyes; the anxiety for their sons and husbands off to Europe. She could see the pain wracking Cynthia Wallstone’s trembling hands as she placed the gold star on her looming flag. And the regards of well-wishes, apologist and patriotic citizens flowing towards Cynthia and her dead son had left Marguerite Rhesilva envious.
“Look at them out there…” Marguerite said to Bernie, the television humming behind her as she poked her head from behind the curtains. A cadre of men with steamers, buckets and vacuums making their way out of their vans and coming in and out of the Wallstone house. “She had one son and she gets a lifetime of free cleanings. And not even a good son. But as soon as that star was on that banner, poof, everyone forgets! Everyone forgets how little Gerald Wallstone smoked like a chimney, or they forget how he burnt down their shed, or they forget how he stole his father’s car and ran over the August family’s dog. They only remember how sweet he was, and how funny. No one ever remembers the shitty gritty… it’s a piss poor exchange rate if you ask me, Bernie.”
But Bernie did not ask her.
Wife nagging you about vacuums? Get her General Elec
“We never caught Junior smoking. We never caught Junior doing much of anything. Gosh, I hope he’s okay. Are you even listening, Bernie?”
Ever need a moment of relaxation? Try Phillip’s new
He sat in front of the television, the flashing lights and sounds keeping thoughts at bay, meshing Marguerite’s little talks with the rest of the white noise. Marguerite was ecstatic when the delivery men arrived with the big, expensive box, but now she only regrets buying the damn thing. It still pleased her that none of the other families in the neighborhood had televisions, smug satisfaction burned in her chest every time she remembered. But now everyone was losing interest, and what started out as a conversation piece was slowly consuming the more intimate bits of her life. Or maybe that started when Junior received his draft notice.
“Oh my lord, and the talk! Did you hear? Apparently Katherine Shohenbaum has been getting her own carpets cleaned for free, too!” Marguerite giggled, “And she doesn’t even have a dead son! Apparently a young steamer comes around whenever Mister Shohenbaum isn’t home, sometimes two! Clara Bellweather says she’s quite the Hoover! The naughty cow! But don’t think Clara’s in the clear either! I’ve seen her! Flouncing around with Genevieve August! You can only spend so much time with another woman before someone gets suspicious!”
She was losing him… and she didn’t know why. Listerine stops bad
“It isn’t right. All these people with their sneaky sins on the outside for everyone to see. It’s disgusting! It’s impolite! They should bottle it up and keep it to themselves… It’s how my mother did it, it’s how I do it, and look how well it’s worked for us!”
You’re irresistible! Lux soap can clean
The conversation piece turned listener, turned responder. When did Bernie stop speaking? The day the draft notice came? Before that? Or had the sounds always come from the box? There were definite voices in the house at some point or was Marguerite just that deafening? No, of course not. Everyone liked Marguerite. But where did the ambulation go? And now Marguerite Rhesilva found herself longing for that. The music and voices streaming through the house, a child’s wind chime laughter gone.
She pawed at her watering eyes.
“Looks like they’re all done now, well most of them. A few are heading for the Shohenbaum house before they go.”
Bernie had finally turned off the television and made his way to the bedroom when Marguerite began her nightly face ritual. From beneath the bathroom door, she could see bedroom lights turn off and the bed whine under Bernie’s weight. The aching springs left Marguerite nostalgic, and she couldn’t remember the last time the Rhesilvas went to bed together. Bernie did not even kiss her or say goodnight, which was all fine. Marguerite did not know how she would explain herself if he ever caught her practicing her faces to the mirror.
She had a variety of looks, one for every situation for when the servicemen would eventually come to the door with the grim news about Junior. She had measured everything. Meticulous in exactly just how she would appear, the amount of tears that would fall, or how her lips and cheeks would strain to keep the rest of her face stoic in an attempt to “keep it all together.”
The first face she practiced in between scrubs was utter shock, her eyebrows moving upwards, her mouth agape at the thought that her beloved Junior had died somewhere in Europe. She worked on solemn acceptance, when she would meet the servicemen at the door, her mascara dry, her lips pursed and shaking, and her eyebrows tightly furrowed and unmoving. But at the end of her scrub, she always, always finished with her favorite: the breakdown. It included all the greats. Her nostrils would flare, her eyebrows would bend, her lips would catfish-flap, her eyes would flood, but the bit that she was most proud of was the fall. How her knees would shake and finally buckle from the turmoil and disbelief. She was working on the logistics of her collapse, how she would catch herself on the doorway before sinking to the ground when she realized how silly the whole process was.
What was she thinking, falling down on her own? The servicemen would surely catch her mid-buckle. She would drag them down with her. She would dig her nails into their uniform all while crying out Junior’s name in a primal and glorious display of motherly affection that no other woman on Earth would ever be able to replicate. The neighbors would talk about her for years to come, saying how every mother loves, but no mother loves like Marguerite Rhesilva.
She hoped everyone would be watching. It would be a virtuoso performance. She’d make that Cynthia Wallstone look like an amateur.
There were many things that Marguerite did not approve of: short skirts, strong liquors, spitting, Negroes, doctors, wild children, anything out of the ordinary, Orientals, and broadcasts about the war. The effort to silence any transmissions ever reaching the Rhesilva house had forced Bernie to listen to global affairs in secret.
“I don’t need to know all the people who died all over the world, Bernie.” She said one night, forcing the dial down. He considered his wife’s willful ignorance closer to a good book being spoiled more than anything.
At the repair garage, Bernie could listen to the radio for however long he wanted. Sometimes, instead of music, he would broadcast the transmissions across the garage’s own speakers. The host’s droning out sums and interpretations of battles left the rest of Bernie’s crew with low morale. There were times when his employees would plead with him to turn it off or at least not play it so much, but Bernie wouldn’t budge. A moment of dead air was a chance of being uninformed. If Bernie didn’t know, he would think for himself the fates of hundreds of men, and he did not want that.
The boys had it rough as they made into the second week at Aachen, but the Germans…
The boys pushed further inland as…
The boys recovered back…
The boys fought…
The boys –
The boys –
The boy –
The lives of a hundred men, a barometer of Junior’s wellbeing.
It was only at home where Bernie felt the need to be surreptitious. When Marguerite excused herself from the table or the couch to use the restroom, Bernie would rush over to the radio. Turning the dial slightly, one ear pressed against the speaker grill and his other ear waiting for the carpet-muffled footsteps of his wife making her way back. The nights she would catch him, she would tut.
“You know how I hate those broadcasts.” And force the dial down or twist it around to find a more appropriate channel, with a nightmare cacophony of voices streaming through the box.
Life got you –
touch that dial! –
take away that –
itch taking –
the men from –
power –
Until Doris Day’s dreamy alto tones flowed out in the middle of A Sentimental Journey. There were nights Bernie thought of protesting, taking charge of the dial once and for all.
Why did I decide to roam?
But he did not. So he sat back in his chair, a child chastised, watching Marguerite pick up the dishes or rearrange the throw pillows as she hummed along in that disgusting manner as if nothing was wrong.
The coffee was too sweet and too creamy to be enjoyed, and now Marguerite was trying to see how much more of Cynthia Wallstone’s sugar cubes she could waste before she went back home.
“It was awful,” Cynthia, recounting how four months ago she thought her son was still alive to all the wives of the neighborhood at their weekly get together. “The servicemen came, and I was pruning away the dried up snapdragon pods, I didn’t even notice them walk up…I think my heart stopped beating then. I knew… I knew. Everything got so quiet… It was too much. It’s all too much.”
I’m sure it’s too much, Marguerite thought. Sitting in the Wallstone’s immaculate kitchen, white tiles and canary yellow paint so bright it rivaled the sun bleeding through the windows. Fruit sitting on countertops, ripening to spoilage. Flowers drying and sun-bleached grievance cards piling up in every other space. Too much free groceries, too much steam cleaning, too much affection. When they come to my door I’ll make sure it’s worth their while.
“We’re all so sorry about what happened to Gerald.” Katherine Shohenbaum said, the rest of the wives agreeing, offering up their condolences.
Just you wait.
“Thank you, Katherine. It means so much to me that you are all here. Everyone has been so kind to me, offering up all this help…”
Did you get the sugar cubes for free, too?
“…I just wish they would stop. These people come around and they clean, and vacuum, and wash, and bring groceries. All the things that I liked doing. All the things that keep me from thinking about Gerald… I just want to forget about my dead son… Does that make me a bad person?”
The wives were silent, nervous glances passed between them. Marguerite noticed a lengthy, longing stare between Clara Bellweather and Genevieve August, and felt disgust when Clara’s hand slipped blindly for Genevieve’s.
“You’re not a bad person,” Clara said finally, “everyone mourns differently.”
“Forgetting that your son is dead is different from remembering how he was alive. You should remember him how you want,” Katherine said handing a napkin to Cynthia as her eyes welled and mascara began to spread.
Cynthia dabbed her eyes, her composure straining to no avail as the tears began rolling down her cheeks until she was bawling into the napkin. Katherine and Clara both rushed to her side cooing, telling her to let it out, that this was all part of the process.
There was a pyre brewing inside Marguerite as she couldn’t remember when she cried like that, for anyone or anything. There were times when she genuinely missed Junior, but had she wept for him? Truly, thoroughly cried? Was she missing the function, that anxiety of separation that seemed inherent with all mothers? Sometimes Marguerite did go into his room. Sit on his bed, smell what he must have smelled, and moved objects around before putting them back where they belonged. There was a music box on his nightstand; something that Marguerite’s own mother had gifted the newborn Junior. They had no use for it now, but when Marguerite sat on Junior’s bed she would pry the lid open and listen to the cylinder sluggishly spin the remains from a previous twist of the key. Chiming out the dying notes of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Marguerite would sing along, fall asleep and wake up with her face wet.
For whatever reason now, she could not bring herself to cry like Cynthia could, not unless she was performing her faces, and what bothered Marguerite was how much that didn’t bother her at all. She picked up her coffee and took a sip, grimacing from the oversaturation of sugar and the sight of the beige, crystalline sludge.
She had only come over to take her hedge clippers back. Marguerite had let Genevieve borrow them some months ago and now getting them back was becoming more trouble than they were worth.
“Why don’t you stay over for lunch? Clara will be over fairly soon. Just us three!”
Would Genevieve and Clara feel insulted if she didn’t want to stay? Marguerite didn’t want them to dislike her if she did. She couldn’t bear anyone not liking her.
It was a decision that Marguerite began to regret as soon as Clara arrived. The rise of discomfort that seemed to linger around her spine as she watched Clara and Genevieve giggle and stare at each other while doing the most mundane things, like passing a sandwich, or napkin, spreading mustard across bread. Marguerite veered her gaze towards the bay window when Genevieve had some fugitive mayonnaise left on her lips that Clara was more than happy to clear away with her fingers.
Marguerite was trying to distract herself, wondering what fabric the curtains were made of when a dark mass moved in the corner of the window. The strangeness of the shape stirred Marguerite in rising and she walked it. Clara said something, but Marguerite did not hear her. She pushed the curtains aside and pressed her face to the glass. It was a Buick. A big, moss green beast with a pale, wilting star on its side. A staff car, one that servicemen drive.
Clara and Genevieve joined her, watching the car slow to a crawl, like some animal skulking prey. They strained their eyes to see who was inside the car, they held their breath and their insides clenched when it looked like it was going to park.
It slowly passed the Shohenbaum house. It reached the Bellweathers, stopped a moment and kept going. It moved passed the August household and further down still to the Wallstones and then finally the car stopped. The brake lights flashed into park in front of the Rhesilva house.
“Oh, Marguerite, I’m so sorry…” Clara said miles away.
Marguerite pushed herself away and out the door. This couldn’t be happening. This shouldn’t be happening. She wasn’t ready yet. There was still so much of her routine that she needed to perfect. Was there even anyone there to answer the door? It was Saturday. Bernie was home. Bernie was going to get the news first. This was going to be Bernie’s moment. It wasn’t fair. She was supposed to be the one to cry out, to scream, and break down. This was her moment.
The doors of the Buick opened and out stepped two servicemen and Marguerite began to sprint. They moved up the driveway and she wanted to cry out to them, to get them to stop, to tell them that they’re ruining everything. She was out of breath, saliva flooding her mouth and an acrid burning near the back of her skull. She almost screamed when she saw one of them ring the doorbell.
Bernie opened the door. He slowly stepped out, an apprehensive animal. The color was draining in Bernie’s face, and he reached out for one of the servicemen, his composure melting into a blubbering mess. His legs buckled beneath him, and he collapsed with the servicemen hovering over him, trying to get him to his feet. She could swear her heart was breaking. When she finally made it to her house, she was uneasy in the way Bernie’s face was contorted into some vaguely familiar twist, something she had not seen in quite a long time. The sounds he made, a whine perhaps. He finally noticed Marguerite standing there, and he pulled her into a hug. All of it was too much.
When they broke apart, Bernie pushed Marguerite towards the servicemen.
“Look! Look, Marguerite!” Bernie said. “He’s home! Junior is home!”
And one of the servicemen looked at his mother, but it wasn’t Junior. This wasn’t the Junior that said goodbye. It couldn’t be Junior, because Junior wasn’t alive anymore. Junior shouldn’t be alive.
“Hi, Mom…” Junior said and moved in for an embrace.
But it wasn’t Junior.
Could not be Junior.
It was not what she wanted.
Original Syntax 